The 1990's decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has in turn driven technologies which have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the internet related distribution of documents, media and programs. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communications distribution channels and the World Wide Web (Web) or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of documents, media and computer programs. It is now possible for the Web browser or wanderer in reviewing Internet or Web search results to spend literally hours going through document after document often less than productive excursions through the Web. These excursions often strained the user's time and resources. In order for the Internet to mature to its great expectations to solid commercial fruition, it will be necessary for the Internet to greatly reduce its drain on time and related resources.
In this connection, regular users of the Internet encounter an additional significant problem, i.e., receiving information on a wide variety of equipment or receiving devices. In our highly mobile business pervasive computing paradigm where user “office” out of little more than their briefcase, it is more and more likely that a user will need to access his information from the Internet at many different receiving stations with associated computer devices having user interfaces of significantly differing functionality, i.e., differing device constraints. Most typical network transmitted documents including electronic mail have been created with the assumption that the user has a moderate to high resolution GUI, keyboard and mouse. Because of these assumptions, most network documents and applications have a look and feel presenting pull down menus and the use of differing fonts and a variety of colors to demark different areas of the interface; the available graphical interface real estate is completely utilized. This is implemented as most standard windows desktop interfaces as the standard for Internet documents, E-Mail and applications. However in our highly mobile business computing environment, many different form factors and device interfaces will be used to access documents and application off the Internet: some will have ¼ VGA displays; others, e.g., personal digital assistant will have small alphameric displays with a single font and pitch. Still others may have no visual interface at all but interface through audible output and speech recognition input. These and other non-conventional user interfaces provide less and less interface resource to the user, i.e., these device interfaces have a great many constraints. To access and sort received documents has been tedious enough with the comfort of high resolution standard desktop interfaces; constrained interfaces such as low resolution, two color or small dimension displays or audible only interfaces tends to make adequate user access almost impossible.